“I had a near-death experience nearly two decades ago,” spoke a Chinese lady professor who had approached me after my talk on “Science & Spirituality – Exploring near-death experiences” at the National University of Singapore. As a speaker who loves to answer questions after my talks, I train myself to expect the unexpected during the post-talk QAs. And yet the sheer unexpectedness of some questions periodically surprises me.
I had written and spoken about near-death experiences, but hadn’t met someone who had actually had one. I listened, intrigued, as she explained that some nineteen years ago, she had had a medical emergency. While she was lying unconscious, she had seen herself leave her body as an effulgent brown particle. The particle, that she understood was her, had floated into a river that went through an underground tunnel. When she had seen a log of wood floating nearby, moving atop it had taken her ashore. There, she had seen walking towards her two men – one elderly, one young. As they closed in on her, they had suddenly disappeared. Concluding that the next thing she remembered was waking up in a hospital bed, she asked what the experience meant.
I answered that more important than the specifics of what she saw was the implication of the overall experience – even when her body was unconscious, she was still conscious. Her continuing consciousness amidst bodily unconsciousness implied that her consciousness didn’t come from her body; but came from something beyond it – from something that continued to exist independent of her body. Exploring the identity of that non-material essence would be far more valuable and consequential than trying to decode the specifics of the experience. If the higher powers that had enabled her to have this special experience had deemed the specifics important, their meaning would have been revealed to her. Since no such meaning had been forthcoming for so long, it was reasonable to infer that the specifics were not all that important. What was much more important was the universal implication: she, at her core, was different from her body. The yoga tradition, and specifically the yoga masterpiece Bhagavad-gita, explained the identity and nature of that non-material essence. By reading the Gita, she could learn far more about herself than she could by trying to decrypt this experience’s specifics.
With a grateful smile, she replied that she felt relieved of an unexplained mystery that had burdened her for so many years.
Another kind of near-death experience
Later, as I reflected on this incident, I realized that I too had undergone a near-death experience – and fairly recently at that. I had missed death by a few minutes and a few meters. Of course, I was playing with words here. The term near-death experience has come to connote a specific kind of near-death experience: an experience of being conscious while being near death. I was using the word in its literal denotation: any experience when one is near death.
During the Brisbane leg of my Australia tour, […]
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